Schizo Times in Cinematic Thought
This chapter is a prelude to the next as it sets up the analysis that will follow. I venture a schizoanalysis of the film The Butterfly Effect, the 2004 film directed by Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber. Both Patricia Pisters, a Deleuzian film theorist, an
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Schizo Times in Cinematic Thought
As is well known, Gilles Deleuze wrote two distinctive and influential books on cinema: Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1986/1983) and Cinema 2: Time-Image (1989/1985) that present an account of the transition between roughly the prewar period (early 1940s) and the p ostwar period—from the classical to the modern. A gap of three years separate these works. For Deleuzian detractors such as Rancière (2006) and Mullarkey (2009), the two books are simply a redemption narrative to be read as a form of continuity. There is no critical break. In short, classical cinema was adequate for expression before the Second World War. It addressed an audience (through movements and actions of characters that mattered), but then fell into a crisis of exhaustion and inadequacy as a result of the event of the Second World War, shattering the movementimage, but then resurrecting the time-image, which became adequate for its time, even if that time was one of loss and decay where no audience was to be found. Characters became visionaries and seers searching for a way to ‘believe in the world,’ although they had lost their power to act as agents. Contra to such a reading, Julien Reid (2010) recognizes the schizoanalysis that Deleuze undertook in and through the interplay of C1 and C2. While the two regimes of images appear as oppositional dualisms (either/or), and the subject to the usual critique levied at Deleuze and his co-writer Guattari by Alain Badiou (2000) and others, Reid maintains that Deleuze formulates an ‘irrational cut’ within the three year gap © The Author(s) 2019 j. jagodzinski, Schizoanalytic Ventures at the End of the World, Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12367-3_2
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that separated their publication. Deleuze provides an exemplary case in the way the Outside, or the unthought, had been thought by artists to intervene in C1 with a new cast of characters. C2 is not merely a continuation or an opposition to the previous image of cinematic thought but acts like a ‘war machine,’ allying itself with a ‘singular race,’ (TP, 379) which is qualified as being always oppressed and inferior. Characters are ‘seers’ who have gained wordly insight into the fascistic tendencies that the movement-image had established prior to the Second World War. Put another way, the ‘endings’ of films in C1 and C2 present us with the disjunctive synthesis between closed and open systems of thought, and a redefinition of infinity as related to time, which I hope to illustrate. In other words, the event of the Second World War causes a rift or gap whereby cinema finds itself performing a both-and logic, the paradoxical logic of ‘neither x or y’ but ‘both,’ leaving a tension between the two positions in place that neither resolves them in dialectical fashion, nor collapses them together: in other words a disjunctive synthesis. Patricia Pisters (2010, 2011, 2012) has gone on to posit a ‘C3,’ the cinema of the neuro-image as a new image of thought within t
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